For thousands of years the rivers were the main highways. Neolithic migrations followed the main waterways. River basins were natural territories for populations, on the banks of rivers we find most cities, rivers were also main trading routes. Click on the picture to see the high resolution map.

An Australian Ph.D. student from the University of New South Wales named Robbi Bishop-Taylor is the one who has redrawn Europe by mapping out its waterways. Bishop-Taylor was able to do this using open source geographic informational software called QGIS to research the 1.35 million streams throughout Europe. The result is a map of European with various blue colors and lines to dictate the different waterways. The thickness of the lines represents the number of each river’s tributaries.